MATTHEW OF WESTMINSTER
The flowers of history, especially such as relate to the affairs of Britain. Vol. I. B.C. 4004 to A.D. 1066.
page 510

• A.B. 1011. When the before-mentioned ministers of iniquity had finished the ravages which I have described, they encompassed Canterbury with a siege. But on the twentieth day of the siege a part of the city was set on fire by the treachery of Almar, archdeacon of the province, whom archbishop iElpheg had formerly saved from being put to death ; and after that the whole city was taken, men were murdered, some were thrown into the flames, others thrown headlong from the walls, many were hung up in a most painful manner and so left to expire, children were torn from their mothers' breasts, and either tossed up into the air and caught on the points of lances, or else cut into small pieces, matrons were dragged by their legs through the streets, and at last thrown into the fire to die. Amid all these miseries, JElpheg, the archbishop of the city, was taken prisoner, bound, dragged along, and tortured with every kind of torture. Almar, the abbot of Saint Augustine s, was permitted to depart. Godwin, bishop of Rochester, and Leofrona, abbess of the nunnery of Saint Mildred, were both taken prisoners, with an innumerable crowd of both sexes. After that, the church of Christ was stripped and burned ; the body of monks, and all the multitude of men, women, and children decimated, so that nine were slain and the tenth saved ; and the number of these thus saved amounted to four monks and eighty men. Therefore, the people having been massacred, the city plundered and wholly burnt, the archbishop iElpheg was dragged along in chains, and driven on, and tortured, and brought to the fleet and again thrust back into prison, where he was tortured for seven months, in order to be compelled to ransom himself so as to deliver himself from the injuries to which he was exposed. And among all these miseries the anger of the divine mercy so raged against the infidel people, that it destroyed two thousand of them by the most fearful torments of the bowels. But as even then those wicked traitors were not moved to repentance, a certain Dane, by name Thrum, when he saw the archbishop afflicted with such tortures, and yet, as it were, unable to die, being moved by a wicked pity, dashed his axe into his head, and so transforming the archbishop who kept confessing Christ with all constancy into a glorious martyr, sent his exulting soul to heaven. And in the place of his passion a dry log, which had been besprinkled with his blood, after one night became green again, and put forth branches

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